


The Greatest Fans in College Football!!!

by alephthirteen



Series: Therapy Fanfics Not Covered By Insurance [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: ASMR Performer Jess, And Misses Home, And Will Try and Make You Miss Home, As in Boxing or Martial Arts, Because I Can Write this Setting, Butch Lena, Butch kara, Kinda, Nebraska AU, Pretty Much Everyone is A College Student, Settings Pulled from Author's Hometown, Sketchy Ways of Making Ends Meet, So Get a Pot of Coffee, Someone Made a Good Point in a Comment, That's Basically Alternate Reality, The Author Has Favorite Alleyways, The Villian is Cornhusker Football, This is Your Fault Guys, Violence In this Fic is Ritual, for fucks sake, no really
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:29:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26915908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alephthirteen/pseuds/alephthirteen
Summary: Lex went mad.  Lena bugged out.  Ditched MIT's master's program for an obscure Jesuit college and exchange courses at a land grant.  Swapped her penthouse for a messy apartment in the basement of a farmhouse in no-fucking-where town called Ashland which only survives because it sits equidistant between two cities.  A two-bedroom with a manageable population of cockroaches and a roommate named Jess.  Scraped through on gig coding jobs, old ladys with broken WiFi and Jess's income from part-time at the local library.She had to survive Lillian's abuse.Villians are someone else's fucking problem.She's not exactly proud of it but fuck it, she's alive.   She's free.  It's almost a relief when the family lawyers make it official.  She's disowned.  It's finally over.Rent's late.-----Alex went here, so surely it's a good school. There have to be boys who don't smell and whoop like baboons and cute girls who also wear goddamned pants in thirty-five-degree weather and spring rainstorms?Right?Then Kara makes a mistake.  Does something she promised Jeremiah she never would.She tries out for a sport.
Relationships: Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Series: Therapy Fanfics Not Covered By Insurance [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1963924
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22





	The Greatest Fans in College Football!!!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shadowcub](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowcub/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Jess catches a bug, Lena is not from around here and maybe she can make it here anyway...

**Lena | Ashland, Nebraska**

Jess is bending over the linoleum floor with a plastic cup in one hand and for some fucking reason, a package of cotton balls in the other. She's still in her 'Stories For Stars' shirt for reading to the kids at the Ashland library and the cute pencil skirt she wears with it is pooled in the corner. Meaning whatever Jess is up to needed freedom of movement and is a shirt and boyshorts deal and Jess' yoga-trimmed backside is tensed and Lena really doesn't need a reason to say anything stupid to her first tolerable roommate ever.

Something is under the shitty Formica table and Jess _wants_ it.

"I feel like there's a whole story here," Lena teases.

"Hah!" Jess crows, slamming the cup down.

"Pass me that rubbing alcohol? And the knife."

Lena does.

Jess soaks a cotton ball in it and then jabs the knife into the cop of the cup. She cuts a small hole and then wads most of the ball into it.

"Thanks. Gentler than putting them in the freezer."

"Won't take long, little one," Jess promises. "Shh."

That's not fair. Jess' voice is a living thing all it's own, slow-moving, scraping and sticky. Like a python coiling around the ears of any listeners who might, maybe, hypothetically, enjoy women's voices in a non-platonic fashion. The last time they were short on grocery bills, Lena joked Jess could make money reading the phone book. So Jess recorded a file of her reading a ridiculous lesbian smut novel off Amazon, Lena slapped some stock photos on it for the video half and they were off to YouTube. They put up a donation link and presto! Lena had just enough in her PayPal to square up her debit card before the fees hit. Jess is only getting a few hours at the library now. Her ASMR and audiobook channel is the rest of it.

"What in God's name are you doing, Jess?"

"Remember when you said if we saw another roach, we might as well start a specimen collection?"

Lena snorts.

"I was kidding."

Jess nods at the corner of the room. There are half a dozen cases of the kind used to pin bugs and a cardboard box marked 'Misc. Instruments' with a University of Nebraska logo.

"Just started ENTO 108 and the professor told us you can get specimen cases for like, $10 at the university auction. Extra credit if we make one of whatever we find in our daily lives and identify them right. Got you tons of weird gizmo bullshit too. The place was dead. They would've handed me everything except the furniture for $500 by the end. Oh, and we have to go pick up some stuff."

"How? We have one and a half cars, Jess."

"Hey! Joanie counts double!"

"Yeah," Lena scoffs. "So fine, two and a half. And mine can hold you, me and a happy thought and that's if I don't forget to charge it."

Joanie is a muddy, lovingly-maintained authentically farm-girl size Dodge Ram. The largest variant, with a full bed and with double tires on the back. Jess' father, Charles Huang is an odd duck, even to Lena who is discovering the many joys of being a refugee from the 21st century trapped in Red State America where sometimes the 1940s aren't quite done. He just _pretends_ Jess isn't gay and if nobody talks about it, it didn't happen which seems to be the motto of the state of Nebraska, or at least her people. Jess arrived in Lincoln with a massive truck, a few pieces of heirloom jewelry, a collection of soft flannels, well-worn boots and cowboy-cut jeans Lena is deeply jealous of, a handgun her mother bought her and strict orders _not_ to get an apartment because the big city wasn't safe and _not_ to stay in the dorms either because those children are bad influences. 

Apparently, there was an assumption one of the local Catholic churches with a large Asian congregation would take her in.

Except the Huangs are Presbyterian, not Catholic. Fifth-generation Chinese American and second-generation ranchers in fuck-all in the Sandhills those churches are founded by Lincoln's Vietnamese Americans. Really, it's such a non-plan of a plan it really smacks of Jess having a hand in it. Telling her dad she had it covered. Not planning it out too much so her parents couldn't check up on her without her telling them where to look and so she could be the gay girl on her own for the first time.

Jess had it covered. Lena's found she had a weird knack for just sorting things out. Nebraska's no paradise and Ashland has at least three meth labs Lena knows about but Jess can zero in on the good ones. The ones who belong in nostalgic movies about 'the good old days' when people didn't lock their doors.

Last week, Lena was staring dumbstruck at a locked truck window with fast-rising panic. Jess's purse and Lena's wallet and the keys were inside. Everything but Lena's phone. This was in the part of town that leaned towards meth labs and skinheads. Lena Luthor, had, bizarrely ended up in a place in life where she couldn't afford to pay AAA. They couldn't change the flat tire unless they got the keys to open the glove compartment for the spare tire crank and the lever to pop open the compartment for the jack. Jess flagged down someone get a ride, borrowed their jack to change the tire, and they took her to the hardware store. She left Lena the gun so no one would eat the trembling, terrified white girl for lunch.

Despite not having her wallet, Jess sweet-talked a wrench and bolt cutters out of the owner after explaining her predicament. The next thing Lena knows, Jess had snipped the chains holding the tire to the undercarriage, used a crescent wrench where a tire wrench was needed, and _gotten it fucking done._ So something Lena might've ended up robbed and stabbed for on the side of the road in downtown Boston, Jess turned into a funny story. The clerk taking belated payment for the wrench, the farm boy taking the borrowed jack back, goggling at Jess hoisting the bad tire into the bed of the truck like it didn't weigh half what she did and his kid sister being pinked cheeked at Jess's biceps and her confident twists as she unstuck the lug nuts. Lena's bra and the underwire provided the last part, the hook to unlock the passenger door.

Jess can somehow turn neighbors and passerby into side characters in a scripted sitcom of Jess's making but big city life doesn't suit Jess. Maybe never will, she admits. Her hope is to go back home and fix up some of the old Carnegie libraries in the small towns. Make properly modern libraries out of them with computers and music collections and so on.

Lena was desperate when she left Boston. She had the contents of her shoebox apartment at MIT, mostly her computers, some electronics and magnifiers and soldering tools. She had a degree -- once they mailed it -- and she had a lunatic brother who had killed nineteen and tried to kill fifty-two people to make some point about something or other. He said there were aliens everywhere and the nation's first female President was one. Wasn't worth the President's time to bother denying it. Cat Grant just quirked an eyebrow and went to the next question.

She could fight for the billions of dollars Lillian held in guardianship or she could bail. She had blazed through a triple major at MIT by 19 for the express purpose of not attending high school with normal children or coming home for the holidays like a happy 16-year-old. She had used her half-Luthor brains from Lionel and her half-whoever birth mother's better instincts all through her teens to meet expectations flawlessly but do so in a disappointing way. To be good enough academically and have bright enough career prospects not to be cut off but not well-groomed enough or classy enough to be brought in to the business or the social circles. So much so that the FBI lady looked at her after she told them she hadn't spoken to Lex in over a year and just left.

When it came down to it, could _Luthor_ up and fight Lillian for the business and probably win and end up with control of an empire or _Lena_ up and bail. She bailed.

She hopped in her overpriced, rich-girl with a guilty conscience electric car, blazed through a U-Haul in a seedy part of Boston for a trailer hitch and went west until the cash in the glove compartment told her it was time to stop. At that point, she was in Council Bluffs Iowa. She got online and looked around. She needed to finish her degree and Creighton looked like the best fit. Still likely to fall all over to have an MIT-trained engineer finish a master's with them but with a rep that meant the degree wouldn't be a placemat when she gets it.

Jesuit-run college so living too close was a hard pass. Omaha has the best queer culture and the most diversity but she didn't want to live in a city where she'd be too easy for Lex's goons to find. She decided to live in a place where people clench up and get nosy when new car parks on the street and the best thugs in America have nothing on overeager church ladies.

There was a Craigslist ad from Jess.

She felt Lincoln was 'far too big' at just over 300,000 people. Lena simply had to ask Jess how _Lincoln_ was too scary big. They realized they were the only lesbians weird enough and stupid enough to have each other for roommates and it was off to the races. 

Enter Ashland. Thirty miles from Lincoln where Jess goes to school, Thirty miles from Omaha where Lena does. Close enough to an old military fiber bundle along the Platte River to have fast (if expensive) internet for Lena's freelance IT work and Jess' ten-way video chats with her library science friends and her high-quality ASMR files.

One electric vehicle charging station.

One house in town that would take their money. Because everyone already knows that 'they' live there. Their landlords are two crotchety guys who fell in love in the Army in the 1980s and quite frankly, beyond adorable. There's a basement apartment they had used for a runaway kid who needed a home five years back. Jess had to knock it with a hammer a few thousand times to get it back up to code but they bartered that for the first four month's rent. 

It's probably technically illegal for being below the water table of the nearby river. So kids egg the house and there's a staircase that leads down here and no one pays Lena and Jess a bit of attention.

it's fine.

Lena burned through the last of her loose cash having the internet upgraded (discount on the rent) and installing security cameras to protect the electronics.

She thought about selling her gear but by then she and Jess were both using the camera, the laptop and the towers for online purposes that earned them at least pocket money and it didn't make any sense.

The microwave beeps. Jess hops up from where she'd been studying the now-still insect on the floor.

"Ooh! That's the bacon. I made some mac 'n cheese for us."

Jess pulls out the torn-cushioned chair for herself and gestures to the more-intact one that's only stained and suspiciously _browner_ of vinyl than it should be.

"Rich girls first," she jokes. 

It smells greasy and the bacon is clearly real and hopefully, Jess used cheese with an 's' not fake glop with a 'z' but either way, Lena's stomach rumbles.

"You, Jessica Huang. You are my hero."


End file.
